Tibor Frank


Tibor Frank is Hungarian historian, a professor of history at the Department of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University. He was director of its School of English and American Studies. Since 2013 he has been a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, as of 2019 he is a full member.

Biography

Frank was born in 1948 in Budapest, Hungary. He graduated from Eötvös Loránd University in 1971 with an M.A. in History and English, obtaining his Dr. Univ. in Modern History there. He received his Ph.D. in History at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, his Habilitation in History at ELTE in 1996, and his D.Litt. at the HAS in 1998. He also attended Cambridge University, England.

Academic career

He started his career at ELTE in the Department of Modern History and continued at the Department of English Studies, where he taught British history. He was one of the founding members of the Department of American Studies in ELTE in 1990 and chair from 1992 to 1994. In Spring 2000 he set up the Ph.D. program in American Studies at ELTE and he has been its program director ever since.
His areas of research are the period from 1848-1945; with respect to international migrations; international images, stereotypes, and propaganda; transatlantic relations; historiography; music and politics.
Professor Frank is chairman of the Commission of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, chairman of the 2nd Bolyai Grant Program and a member of the Book and Journal Commission of the Academy. Frank founded Hungary’s Modern Filológiai Társaság of Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1983, and served the Association as Secretary General from 1983 to 1996 and as Vice President between 1996 and 2007. He has been on the board of Historical Abstracts , Nationalities Papers , Polanyiana , the European Journal of American Culture and Külügyi Szemle . Since 2015 he has been Editor of Századok, journal of the Hungarian Historical Association.
He was co-president, and has become honorary president, of the Hungarian Association of American Studies and was a board member of the European Association for American Studies ; in 2010-2011 he was, and as of 2017 he is again, Chairman of the U.S.—Hungarian Fulbright Board. Between 2007 and 2015 he was deputy chairperson of Magyar Történelmi Társulat, in 2015 he was elected Chairman of the Editorial Board of its journal Századok

Visiting professorships and research grants

Between 1988 and 1990 Tibor was a Fulbright Visiting Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara and also at UCLA. In 1990—91 he was invited to the University of Nevada, Reno as a Distinguished Visiting Professor of History sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Between 1988—97 he taught at UCSB Summer Sessions; between 1994 and 1997 he was founder and director of UCSB’s The New Europe program. He was an István Deák Chair Visiting Professor at the History Department of Columbia University in the City of New York in 2001, 2007, and 2010. His Humboldt Prize of 2002 took him to the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, Germany.
Since 1992 he has been a regular visiting professor at the Education Abroad Program of the University of California in Budapest, Hungary, at the Salzburg Seminar's Center for the Study of American Culture and Language in Salzburg, Austria, in the Nationalism Studies Program of the Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, in the UNESCO-sponsored Minority Studies Program of the Institute of Sociology of ELTE, and the IES Abroad Vienna in Vienna, Austria.
Between 2003 and 2009 he acted as a teamleader, with Frank Hadler, of the European Science Foundation Programme "Representations of the Past: The Writing of National Histories in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Europe", coedited as Disputed Territories and Shared Pasts: Overlapping National Histories in Modern Europe, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011.

Honors and awards

Tibor Frank was awarded the Országh Award in 2000, the Humboldt Forschungspreis from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for 2002, the Szent-Györgyi Albert Prize of Hungary in 2005. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London in 2006.

Books

Textbooks
Edited books
He is married to psychologist and author Zsuzsa F. Várkonyi, an honorary university professor; his son Benedek Frank is an economist, grandsons Bálint and Benjámin go to school.